Posts tagged “GDC 2013”

A real high-point of every GDC is the Game Design Challenge. Well, was. Sadly the tenth year of this annual treat was the last, with organiser Eric Zimmerman bringing proceedings to an end. And wow, did it go out in style. With the apposite topic, "Humanity's Last Game", some of the biggest names in the industry put forth their pitches for the last game we'd…

RPS's own wayward ronin word master Cara Ellison, during a post-convention victory dinner, put it best: "GDC is where we first hear about all the stuff everyone will be talking about next year." Maybe it's a trend-setter, or maybe it's just a megaphone for gentle tickles of trends that are already in motion, but the point remains: GDC tends to be pretty indicative of where…

An undoubted highlight of GDC every year is the Experimental Gameplay Workshop. Despite having that complete nonsense word in the title, it's a chance for some of the most innovative and esoteric gaming ideas to be shared with one of the week's biggest audiences, whether in development, released, or some impossible state in between. Some of the highlights are below.

British strategy captains The Creative Assembly have used their lead designer James Russell's talk at GDC to reveal that they are creating a multiplayer game based on the Total War series. It's called Total War: Arena [URL dead at the time of writing, but I am told it will appear there], and it will be free-to-play, based on the original Total War multiplayer, and feature…

Rome II, then. I've just seen The Creative Assembly's Al Bickham playing the recently-entrailered Teutoburg Forest battle on a big screen at GDC in San Francisco. As is so often the case with viewing games from the perspective of rapidly blogged trailers and press releases, I'd previously been unable to see much of what was new or appealing about this new Total War game. I…

I am on the show floor at GDC, standing next to an unflappable and smiling Thomas Lund of Full Control Studios. He is pleased. He is showing me Space Hulk. He is so excited about it that I can't help get caught up in his enthusiasm and start feeling giddy, even though I have been taking all of my cynicism medication. He's been gesticulating and…

When it comes to award ceremonies, there aren't many to take seriously. But with all its internal and external fighting, perhaps those at the annual Game Developers Conference tend to hold the most weight. We're talking relatively, here. Both the Game Developers Choice Awards, and the Independent Games Festival Awards are given away on the Wednesday evening of the week, this year falling on the…